Conventional Surface-Mount Technology (SMT) provides a way of interconnecting electronic circuit components. For example, according to conventional surface mount technology, electronic devices can be specifically packaged for subsequent mounting directly on a respective surface of a printed circuit board. Because of the advantages associated with surface mount technology such as smaller part size, surface mount technology has, to a large extent, replaced so-called through-hole technology in which wire leads of components are fitted and soldered into holes of a printed circuit board to alternatively provide connectivity.
Surface mount devices can be packaged according to a variety of different styles. For example, a surface mount device can have relatively small leads or no leads extending from the package at all. Because a surface mount device has relatively small leads or no leads at all, a surface mount device is usually smaller than its through-hole (e.g., pin-based) counterpart. The surface mount device may have short pins or leads of various styles, flat contacts, a matrix of solder balls (such as Ball Grid Arrays), or terminations on the body of the component.
According to one conventional application, surface mount devices also can be designed to include internal bond wires connecting nodes of an integrated circuit to pads of the surface mount device. The pads of the surface mount device can then be connected to a respective circuit board.
In many cases, the density of nodes on a semiconductor chip is so high that directly mounting the nodes of the chip to a corresponding circuit would be difficult if not impossible. As an alternative to utilizing conventional bond wires to provide connectivity, conventional techniques include creating so-called Fan-Out Wafer-Level (FOWL) type packages.
In accordance with conventional FOWL packaging techniques, each of one or more nodes residing on a single side of a semiconductor chip in an electronic circuit package extend outward via a respective fan-shaped conductive path to a corresponding solder ball or surface mount pad of a respective electronic circuit package encapsulating the chip. Thus, corresponding surface pads of the electronic circuit package can be sufficiently “fanned out” from a single side of the semiconductor chip such that it is possible to mount the electronic circuit package (and semiconductor chip therein) to a circuit board.